Blogging On The iPhone Part 1

Apple’s iPhone has been touted as delivering the full Internet to a mobile device and of course what would the Internet be without a little Blogging action? Here are some tips to help you get your Blogging (pocket Blogging?) started on the iPhone.

Getting Used To The Keyboard

One of the biggest obstacles you’ll need to overcome on the iPhone is the virtual keyboard. I have stressed this point in other iPhone reviews that you’ll need to really push yourself to learn how the keyboard works. If you cannot dedicate yourself to at least a week to the keyboard then you should rethink your purchase. I like to think of this as wearing dental retainers: you can wear them for a while but should you neglect them you’ll teeth will fall back.

I do recomend a few tips to better improve your finger typing.

Do Not Be Intimidated
I cannot stress how important it is. Let that keyboard know whose boss by revealing your courage, that you are a fearsome Blogger with thumbs of fury that will tear about any keyboard.

Do Not Adapt
The iPhone won’t be your only keyboard that you’ll interact with. The key is to bring over your typing habits from your current keyboard setup and use them without adjusting them on the iPhone.

If you do adapt different styles your muscle memory will go out of whack, and could degrade your performance as you’ll be switching back and forth to accomodate two or more vastly different environments.

Plan Of Attack
If you have just received your iPhone and really want to tackle the keyboard then follow these steps. For the first three days only use on finger, left or right it does not matter. Let your finger get a feel of the keyboard, where they are positioned. Throughout these three days use the keyboard in portrait mode more as the landscape version is only usable in 1 Application.

Day four through seven should focus on finding your comfortable position. This is the phase where trial and error is prevalent. Once your hand is comfortable the speed at which you type will increase significantly, you don’t want to develop some sort of pain in your fingers would? The iPhone is called Multi-Touch for a reason.

From this point forward it should be typing how your normally do. Accept that you will make many mistakes but in a short amount of time your muscles will have remembered the layout of the keys.

Adjusting Your Blog

There are some significant shortcomings of the iPhone you must surpass if you want to enjoy a true mobile Blogging experience. While the device does attempt to predict what word you were trying to type it does not allow you to spell check any words at all, this is system wide and not unique to the iPhone’s browser Safari.

Luckily I did find a plugin that should be able to help this problem. The solution comes in the form of a spell checker plugin for WordPress, Visual.SpellCheck. This plugin is an AJAX spell checker and should be able to handle your needs allowing to check your words while on the iPhone.

Besides creating an optimal Blogging environment you should consider a few things. The iPhone has no real file manager as of yet which means any pictures you would like to add to each post must be done so beforehand. There is no copy and paste function so I would highly recommend using the WordPress Booklet to create part of your post and fill in the details.

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Comments

I don’t really believe in the iPhones browser. I mean it is really a great mobile browser, but it’s still far from bein perfect. For example it is not able to display Flash thats a real necessity at least for me.